Beyond Nature

I remember a joke by Degas about Impressionism: C'est plein de courants d'air. He meant that, rather than painting  en plein air, he preferred the closed room of his own studio, the dim light that filtered through the wide windows of the atelier, whose panes were almost never washed. That was a guarantee of truth, the truth of his own memory, that distillation which remains when you’ve forgotten all you know about reality. And to understand this 'seclusion' I refer again to Degas, when, while travelling through Burgundy along with his friend Bartholomé, he sketched those landscapes, ‘unique’ pieces in a career as wide and teeming with paintings, drawings and sculptures of various subjects, and afterwards he tod people he had had the window of the moving train as a ‘frame’.

Why do I think of all this in front of Michele Dolz's paintings? Maybe because I know I’m looking at landscapes. Do I? I can say I know, in the same way as Andrea Beolchi spots extreme perspective in the catalogue: what is the limit dictating its radicality? The dissolution of the perspective cage or the visual construction made only by pictorial shapes? Degas thought of memory as a surviving trace, a sort of mnemonic groove, a distillation of history put to the test of reality, which emerged on the retina after a slow construction, tested and tested again. I t is procedural, I would say, in the sense that at one last stage, what we see on the canvas, does not correspond to the degrees of evolution, but to the explicitation of that form deposited in the deep. Those who entered the French painter's atelier could find a ‘sequence’ of works in progress, different transfiguration stages of the same pictorial subject.

Last May, Dolz exhibited some works in Milan, in the little church of Ancient Oratory of the Passion, near the basilica of St. Ambrose. In these paintings, sometimes of large size, what dominates is landscape. A metabolized reality, now a part of him; we are in the field of resonance, a timbric score like some contemporary music, which from pure chromatic dissonance brings out the skeleton of the image. One thing is certain: Dolz uses interiority as a crucible within which he dissolves pigment; and in its fire the image of the world is purified of the dross that still denotes the category or the real. The landscape that is seen is not landscape that is painted. And so Dolz’s painting is beyond nature, it is recreation of shape in human gesture weaving on canvas the architecture of vision.

You feel the mediation of some neo-expressionist painting, but the search for an internal balance refers immediately to the control on the form that is the habitus of the European Mediterranean. Not, certainly, realization of nature understood as a distillation and synthesis of neoclassical beauty or a romantic myth of the origin: the actus also burns the dross of culture, or, rather, the disagreement of the aesthetic categories that encapsulates everything new in the yoke of the ‘different repetition’. Those we see are landscape forms, but their meaning in not phenomenological, it is not a reorganization of reality according to intellectual categories; I like to think that, in the end, the landscape, much more than a theme or a genre, is for Dolz the most direct route to get to the archetype of the form, its ‘totality’, which is the only current possibility of interpreting the symbol in its generative qualities. It is not a system of signs, but a symbolon, that is a metaphysical wound that refers in its essence to the whole that it once was. Besides the happiness of colour, which one can perceive in front of the work, the total light in which you are wrapped is rather a radiation, an chromatic explosion that, when freed, reveals the tragic guarded by the shape that ‘enters the world’.